The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (13 page)

No one had ever before tried to stop a river this powerful, and the first challenge was to blast four massive tunnels through the sides of the canyon walls—which took eighteen months—and then force the river into them using the same trick that Harry Cory had employed during his fight to save the Imperial Valley twenty-six years earlier, except that dump trucks took the place of railway battleships. On the evening of November 12, 1932, a fleet of one hundred heavy trucks began jettisoning their loads at a rate of one every fifteen seconds.
Fifteen hours later, the Colorado sluggishly turned into the smooth maws of the tunnels and began to snake around the section of bedrock where the dam could now be raised.

For the next two years, an army of five thousand men swarmed the bottom and sides of Black Canyon, toiling in temperatures that reached as high as 140 degrees in the summer. While high-scalers armed with crowbars and jackhammers dangled from ropes prying fresh rock from the canyon walls,
^I
laborers at the bottom of the chasm excavated the river channel until they reached the bedrock that would anchor the dam. Then they started pouring concrete, which
arrived in giant steel buckets that were lowered into the chasm on suspension cables. The pouring continued virtually nonstop:
sixteen tons per minute, 220
cubic yards an hour, twenty-four hours a day, for twenty-one months, until a titanic wedge whose base was the thickness of two football fields had risen up between the sides of the canyon. Finally, on February 1, 1935, the edifice was complete, and a set of massive steel gates was lowered over the entrances to the diversion tunnels so that the river, blocked from its downstream course, began lapping at the bottom of the newly completed Hoover Dam.

Overstating the significance of Hoover is almost impossible, so thoroughly did the dam surpass—in the scale of its components, in the novelty of its construction, in the sheer audacity of its design—everything that had come before.
It soared 726 feet and five inches above the bed of the river,
double the height of any other dam on earth. Its spillways, intake towers, generators, and powerhouse were the largest of their kind. Lake Mead, the body of water behind the dam, would take years to fill and would become the largest man-made reservoir in the world, stretching 115 miles upriver and
capable of holding more than twenty-six million acre-feet,
enough water to flood the entire state of Connecticut to the eaves of a one-story house. As Michael Hiltzik points out in
Colossus,
one of the finest books on the dam, the weight of that impounded water would deform the surface of the earth along the reservoir and trigger a series of earthquakes that would topple chimneys and
buckle roadbeds between Boulder City and Las Vegas well into the 1960s.

Those superlatives were remarkable. But no less astonishing was the lack of any antecedent, model, or foundational paradigm for building such a thing as Hoover. Instead of tweaking or improving upon what came before, Reclamation’s engineers, who represented some of the sharpest technological minds in the country, were forced to surmount obstacles by making wholesale leaps into the unknown. They ventured into hitherto unknown subdistricts of complex geometry, and they pioneered new techniques such as trial-load analysis and crown-cantilever adjustments. Those forays were aided by the explosion in the disciplines of civil engineering, hydraulics, and fluid mechanics during the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. But resolving the problems on the ground, as opposed to on paper, also required a willingness to adopt bold and highly unorthodox ideas. The entire project was one giant experiment.

Perhaps the best example involved the challenges posed by the fact that concrete gives off chemical heat as it cures and hardens. This had previously limited the size of such structures because, if they were made from a continuous pour, they would fracture. So instead of building a seamless slab, the engineers designed the dam as a matrix of blocks, each roughly the size of a house, interlocked
like Legos. In between those blocks, they ran a network of pipes carrying chilled water. Having thus turned the dam into a giant concrete refrigerator, in effect, they essentially
cut the cooling time from 125 years to three. As with everything else at Hoover, this was accomplished without anyone’s truly knowing that it would actually work.

Three generations later, viewed from the standpoint of the digital age, a structure such as Hoover can appear to suffer from a kind of vulgarity of size—a thing so enormous and monolithic as to seem preindustrial, almost primitive. Like fascist architecture, that soaring wall of concrete, for all its Art Deco adornments, can strike the postmodern eye as embarrassingly elephantine and childishly simplistic. Yet one only need page through the dam’s elegant blueprints to realize that this is a machine that, in its own way, is as sophisticated as a Boeing 747—a marvel of engineering, of mathematics, of human thinking, of vision, and, yes, of art. For all these reasons, Hoover is regarded by many civil engineers as one of America’s most impressive achievements. It may not be much of an overstatement to say that, along with splitting the atom and sending the
Voyager
spacecraft beyond the solar system, Hoover is the most remarkable thing this country has ever pulled off.

Unlike those other achievements, however, Hoover arose in the midst of an era of nationwide fear and collective self-doubt, the darkest period of the Great Depression, when factories were idle, corporations were going bankrupt, and millions of ordinary Americans had begun to doubt the future. The manner in which the dam rose up, like a cathedral of technology from the depths of Black Canyon during a moment when everything else was falling to pieces, did more than buoy the hopes of millions of the nation’s citizens. The dam also seemed to offer demonstrable, concrete proof that the key to human progress lay with scientific savoir faire and technological know-how.

Perhaps no one captured this optimism better than J. B. Priestley, a prolific English novelist who traveled extensively throughout the Southwest during the 1930s (and who would later have some rather illuminating things to say about the Grand Canyon).
“This is a first glimpse of what chemistry and mathematics and engineering and large-scale organization can accomplish,” Priestley declared in an article in
Harper’s Magazine.
“You might be tempted to call it a work of art; as if something that began with civil engineering ended somewhat in the neighborhood of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.”

A
mong its many other hallmarks, Hoover represented a watershed moment in the relationship between Americans and their landscape, especially their rivers. Inspired by the achievement at Black Canyon, the Bureau of Reclamation
and its sister agency, the US Army Corps of Engineers, didn’t wait for Hoover to be finished before setting off on an ambitious crusade to erect dams across every major US river, from the Rio Grande, the Snake, the Missouri, and the Arkansas to the Sacramento, the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Tennessee, and the Ohio. The aim of that crusade—
embodied in the bureau’s motto: “Our Rivers: Total Use for Greater Wealth”—was
to harness and exploit virtually every drop of free-flowing water in the country.

If that sounds a bit far-fetched, one need only consider the superlatives that attached themselves to the dam-building projects on which the federal government embarked during this era. By 1936, five of the largest structures on the planet, all of them dams, were simultaneously
under construction along the rivers of the western United States: Hoover on the Colorado, Shasta on the Sacramento, Bonneville and Grand Coulee on the Columbia, and Fort Peck on the Missouri. Moreover, each of these projects was surpassed in size and scope by its successor. As colossal as Hoover was, Shasta was quite a bit bigger, and both were dwarfed by Grand Coulee,
whose mass outstripped that of Hoover and Shasta put together—the first man-made structure to
exceed the volume of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

When Hoover was finished, it was the greatest single source of electricity in the world. But several months later, when Grand Coulee went online, its power plant was capable of
generating half as much electricity as the rest of the entire
country.
By the 1940s, Coulee’s generators were powering factories that produced thousands of warplanes bound for the aircraft carriers that would turn the war in the Pacific in America’s favor while simultaneously powering the top-secret Hanford installation in eastern Washington that produced
the plutonium-239 that fueled the atomic bomb.

For the next thirty years, tens of thousands of dams—a few of them large and magnificent, but the vast majority unapologetically functional and devoid of any symphonic romance—were erected from one end of the country to the other. By 1980, when the National Park Service finally completed an inventory of all the rivers in the contiguous United States, more than seventy-five thousand dams had been erected on the country’s three-thousand-plus waterways—roughly one dam for every forty-eight hours that had passed since the summer of 1540, when Cárdenas had first stumbled upon the Grand Canyon. As the author Bruce Barcott has pointed out in his provocative treatise on a dam in Belize,
The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw
,
every major river in the United States had been dammed except for one, the Yellowstone. There were twenty-nine dams on the Mississippi,
thirty-six on the Columbia,
forty-two on the Tennessee.

In the end, however,
nothing compares to what we did to the Colorado.

F
rom the moment the gates to Hoover’s diversion tunnels were slammed shut in the winter of 1935 and water began rising along the upstream face of the dam, the days of the lower Colorado’s uncontrolled rages were numbered. There would be no more mad dashes into the Salton Sink, no more jumping whimsically from one channel to the next across the desert. Nor would the power of the river—the energy contained inside its gradient—be permitted to go to waste. It would now be converted to electricity that would help drive the vast industrial expansion that was about to take place in the shipyards, aircraft factories, and light-metal refineries of Southern California.

But if this marked the end of the Colorado’s unbounded freedom, as far as the government’s water engineers were concerned, it was only the first in a series of problems that had to be solved. The completion of Hoover was a monumental achievement, but it brought only the lower section of the Colorado under control.
The work of harnessing the rest of the river had just begun.

In March of 1946, the Interior Department published a massive report that contained a blueprint for the development of the entire Colorado. It was the fruit of decades of painstaking survey work, geologic mapmaking, sheer-strength analysis of rock samples, plus a dozen other forms of sniffing, testing, and prodding.
Nicknamed the Blue Book, the tome contained 293 pages, weighed more than four pounds, and put forth a mission statement that was neatly encapsulated by the tagline on the title page: “A Natural Menace Becomes a Natural Resource.” Inside, what was perhaps most revealing was the manner in which it was written. In language exhibiting both a stridency and a frankness that no government document would display today, the Colorado was portrayed as a criminal and a deadbeat that was running amok and obstructing the creation of wealth.

To correct these abuses, the Blue Book outlined 134 potential projects, one in virtually every major canyon and farming valley along the length of the river. The sheer numbers of dams, reservoirs, hydro plants, and irrigation projects slated for the river and its tributaries dwarfed anything planned for any other waterway of comparable size. The bureau was clear that not all of these schemes could be developed—doing so
would exceed the Colorado’s flow by 25 percent and send the river into “deficit.” Instead, the purpose of the document was to provide its intended audience—the politicians who represented the interests of the mountain and desert states through which the Colorado coursed—with a menu of options, a kind of buffet table from which they could put together a plate of goodies for the constituents of every district the river touched.
“Only a nation of free people have the vision to know that it can be done and that it
must be done,” the report declared. “Tomorrow the Colorado River will be utilized to the very last drop.”